COMPUTEX — Abit had a few interesting things going on at its Computex booth. First and foremost were two motherboards based on Intel’s upcoming X38 chipset. The most feature-laden one is the IX38-MAX pictured below:
This board will be packed with DDR3 support, multiple PCI Express x16 slots, CrossFire support, and so on. This board is scheduled to come out in the August-September time frame with a price tag somewhere over the $200 mark. For enthusiasts who’d rather not cough up that much on a motherboard, Abit is also cooking up the IX38 QuadGT, pictured here in a running system with a pair of Radeon X1950 Pro graphics cards:
The IX38 QuadGT will be Abit’s more affordable X38 option. It will have DDR2 memory support, and sources tell us its price tag might be around $160. Interestingly, Abit says the X38 chipset runs rather hot—so hot, in fact, that Abit’s X38 mobos may don both heat pipe-based heatsink and fans. (The firm’s current top-of-the-line offerings have passive heatsinks.)
Abit also had two overclocking pros—Fugger and and Crotale—toying around with a potent combination of quad-core processors and liquid nitrogen. The overclockers succeeded in pushing Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 processors to over 4.5GHz with the aid of Abit IP35 Pro and IN9 32X-MAX motherboards. According to Fugger, the latter could withstand a front-side bus speed of a whopping 600MHz.
